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The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other "Okies", they seek jobs, land, dignity, and a future. The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was released in 1940. - Wiki

Analysis And Reception<br> The families and workers are exploited by organized business, and Steinbeck uses Christian religious imagery to press his arguments that using cropland as a source of profit for business rather than food for people causes widespread suffering and that political and spiritual unity is necessary to overcome the forces causing the dispossession of farmworkers. Ultimately, the migrants learn to rely on one another, and the insularity of the Joads—Ma’s obsession with family togetherness, Tom’s self-centredness, and Rose of Sharon’s materialism—gives way to a sense of universal community, a shift from an emphasis on “I” to “we.”<br> Steinbeck masterfully depicted the struggle to retain dignity and to preserve the family in the face of disaster, adversity, and vast, impersonal commercial influences. He based his epic on his visits to the migrant camps and tent cities of the workers, seeing firsthand the horrible living conditions of migrant families. His novel, with its easily accessible, colloquial style, was widely welcomed and hailed by working-class readers, though it was just as widely panned by business and government officials who took umbrage at its socialist overtones and denounced it as “communist propaganda”; some local areas, including Kern County, California, where the Joad family settles, branded the book libelous and even burned copies of it and banned it from libraries and schools. Nonetheless, it was the top-selling novel of 1939, and it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1940, the year of John Ford’s acclaimed film adaptation of the book. The Grapes of Wrath also did much to earn the author the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Steinbeck plainly stated his purpose in writing the novel: “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Depression and the plight of the worker].” - Telegraph

The Grapes of Wrath: surprising facts about John Steinbeck's novel<br><br> The book gave Route 66 its nickname<br> In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck became the first writer to refer to Route 66 – the two-lane, 2,448-mile-road that connects Chicago to Los Angeles – as the "Mother Road". In doing so, he helped capture the road’s image of redemption and turn it into a cultural icon. The fictional Joad family of the novel was an example of the thousands of people migrating to California to escape the despair of the Dust Bowl states, and many used Route 66. "66 is the mother road," Steinbeck wrote, "the road of flight."<br> His novel was burned and banned<br> The Associated Farmers of California dismissed the novel as a "pack of lies" and "communist propaganda". The book was briefly banned in the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin, because the ruling Communist Party was troubled by the thought that it showed that even the most destitute Americans could afford a car. Steinbeck received death threats and the FBI put him under surveillance. The book was banned in many libraries and copies were symbolically burned in towns across America. When WB Camp, one of the most successful cotton producers in California, presided over its burning in Bakersfield, he said: ''We are angry, not because we were attacked but because we were attacked by a book obscene in the extreme sense of the word.''<br> Writing the book stretched Steinbeck's nerves<br> The novel was written over five months (June-October 1938) and his diaries (Working Days: The Journal of The Grapes of Wrath) show a man losing control and confidence. He was writing shortly after the death of his brother-in-law and it was a time in his life when he was plagued by doubts about the prospect of war and worries over the sale of his house in California. "Did ever a book get written under such excitement," he wrote. "My whole nervous system is battered. I hope I’m not headed for a nervous breakdown. My nerves are going fast. . . I wish I could just disappear for a while. So many things to drive me nuts. I’m afraid this book is going to pieces. If it does, I do too." When it was finished he wrote: "It isn't the great book I had hoped it would be. It's just a run-of-the-mill book." The run-of-the-mill book won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. - Telegraph